Looking Out.
Looking In.
Always Edgy.

October 2009

28 October 2009

When a
male boss spreads himself under the sheets with female colleagues (and these
women are excelling for reasons everyone–including the office janitor–can
explain), should the underlings in the group (1) tut-tut in annoyance, gnash
their teeth and try to do their job anyway, (2) feign innocence, become
political monks and reside above gossip, (3) get circumstantial evidence and
snitch on them to the biggest boss or (4) just plain move on?

Ex-Letterman
Writer Nell Scovell, according to her essay published yesterday in Vanity
Fair, shrugged
and took route 4. She decided she couldn’t do anything to upset the banana cart
steered by the Big, gap-toothed Banana, probably figuring that one day she may
have to come back to the Big Banana to give her a leg up (oh, grow up,
people).Instead, she focused on
what she loved, which was her genre of writing and moved on to yet another
writing job where, she says, “the atmosphere was respectful”.

“I stayed for several seasons. Since then, I’ve racked up
a long list of credits as a TV writer, series creator, producer, and director.
In short, I moved on.”

Scovell’s
essay, written with zero defensiveness, got me on her side very quickly.At first. By the time I reached the end
of her story, however, I felt something was wrong with the picture.Why?Scovell, I felt, had taken the easy way out.I commend her on her pragmatism, her
focus on what would get her mileage in the short and the long term and her
sense of priority (as it related to her career, her family and her peace of
mind). But I was disappointed that a woman wielding such an obviously fluid pen
didn’t care to use it to dice, mince and squish out the Big Banana–along with
his Nilla wafers–when she had the chance.

Publishing
her essay now–many years later and for a very tidy sum, no doubt–long after the
fruit is mottled and limp doesn’t get her any brownie points from me. For one,
her non-confrontational stance didn’t further the fight against sexual
harassment of women and the intimidation of women in a male-dominated
workplace. Secondly, what did she do to garner the respect of her gum-chewing,
fart-joke writing male colleagues? When things didn’t work out, she simply
shrugged and left. That’s all. She didn’t show the men in her writing group–men
who must have sisters and mothers and grandmothers–that almost every member of
the fairer sex ultimately wants fairness even if one among them may prefer to
strut sexy.

By
sneaking out of the Letterman den without a squeak even when Letterman asked
her why she was leaving (Oprah might say “Gurl, what were you thinkin’?”), Scovell dragged
women back several decades to a time before the sixties when Gloria Steinem and
Betty Freidan began fighting for fair treatment of women, at home and in the
workplace.

I’ll sign
off with Steinem's 1971 Address to the Women of America which addressed the issues of sexism and misogyny and racism and class.

“This is no
simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy, visibledifferences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior
and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still
depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other
than those chosen, or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”

20 October 2009

In Saratoga, the town where I
live, you need a permit to breathe. When I realized it was time to chop down a
blue spruce tree in our front yard which had been dead awhile, I was warned
about needing to get a tree permit.

“Wait a minute,” I said, to
the fourth man who dropped by with an estimate for dead tree removal. “Who
needs a permit to fell a dead tree?”

“You NEED a permit,” he
shrugged.“You can call the city
but this trunk spans over 10 inches in diameter and in Saratoga you need a
permit if any tree that’s over four feet tall measures 10 inches or more in
diameter.”

That was not all. There was,
I found out, a price to pay to fell a dead tree. To chop a tree on our property
for which we already pay property tax–a hefty sum that might pay for many
vacations on the French Riviera–I would need to cut a check for $75.

So I called the arborist of
the city of Saratoga, a pleasant lady, and asked her if I could, as a special
case, be excused from paying up for a tree that was six feet under even though
it was almost forty feet over.Her
voice turned sharper than the edge of a tree-saw.“Ma’am, if the city decided to not charge for dead trees,
you’d be surprised how many dead trees there’d be in Saratoga day after day,”
she flung back. Her answer summarized the potential for human deviance against
the face of the law.

Speechless and defenseless, I
scribbled out a check addressed to the city. A day or so later, the pleasant
but steely arborist drove by the house and hovered around the driveway for what
amounted to some 13 seconds, her engine humming while she checked something
on a paper about a fir tree that stood like a brown lighthouse beckoning eager tree
removal specialists from as far as Washington DC.

The next day the permit was
in the mail. Why couldn’t she have saved a few trees by just dropping off the
permit in my mailbox while she hung by our driveway? Aren’t arborists grafted
with the tree hugging spirit at some point? I marked it off as yet another irony in the drama of life in
the United States.